[wenc]

As someone who's lived abroad several times in my life, I agree. I've always had local bank accounts in my countries of residence.

That said, I have recently heard of a new product called the Transferwise Borderless Account that lets you hold money in different currencies, and along with the provisioning of local banking IDs in several jurisdictions like the EU, UK, Au/NZ, Hungary, Romania, Singapore and the U.S. It also comes with a debit Mastercard.

Any thoughts about this?

https://transferwise.com/us/borderless/

[wheybags]

Transferwise is great, I do have one of their multi currency debit cards. It doesn't fully solve the problem though, it's more useful for visits and online purchases.

You couldn't get paid straight into it, so you need to get paid into your home account, then transfer in dollars, then convert them into local currency, so you're still doing two forex transactions. Better than one for each purchase, but will not ideal. Also, it's still not a real local bank account, so all the problems wrt government and bills still apply.

[wenc]

The Transferwise Borderless page (see section "Coverage") says they provide a local bank ID in several countries (ABA/Routing in the US, SWIFT/BIC and IBAN in the EU etc), so it seems like it would be like a real local bank account?

I'm thinking this could be quite useful for digital nomads.

[wheybags]

Oh, OK, I didn't realise you got a personal account number like that. I mainly used it for card transactions while traveling.